On the Idea of Potency: Juridical and Theological Roots of the Western Cultural Tradition

Emanuele Castrucci

Abstract

Does there exist a Logos capable of limiting the very power of God? This question closely relates an inquiry arising in classical Greek philosophy to the theological knowledge originating in Jewish biblical exegesis. Two thoroughly unrelated worlds, one would say, yet a historical nexus between them existed, that created by Christianity, which has marked the destiny of our West. As Leo Strauss has masterfully shown, Christianity has been for two thousand years, despite its many inner contradictions, something like an interface between two hitherto unrelated worlds: Greek philosophy and biblica ... More

Does there exist a Logos capable of limiting the very power of God? This question closely relates an inquiry arising in classical Greek philosophy to the theological knowledge originating in Jewish biblical exegesis. Two thoroughly unrelated worlds, one would say, yet a historical nexus between them existed, that created by Christianity, which has marked the destiny of our West. As Leo Strauss has masterfully shown, Christianity has been for two thousand years, despite its many inner contradictions, something like an interface between two hitherto unrelated worlds: Greek philosophy and biblical revelation. By reformulating them and turning them on their heads, it has shaped an entire civilization: our Western civilization, which is now drawing to a close. Thus, never has it been as appropriate as the present moment to come to grips with our opening question about the “limits of God”, or about the original laws of logic and ontology that somehow “limit” God’s very actions, since it arises from the profound need – prior to St. Paul unthinkable in concrete terms – to form a link between these two radically different worlds. Our West, with its devastating philosophical rationalism, its systematic Christian-Enlightenment repudiation of the Spinozist-Nietzschean concept of potency, from its very inception hinged on this question of knowledge of a law before God and above God. Today we must acknowledge that – precisely because of what this question, taken to its extreme consequences, implies – it was destined from its origins to end.